When the Tom Cruise action vehicle Edge of Tomorrow opened last year, I was in no rush to see it. I’m not a big Tom Cruise fan, and word-of-mouth seemed to indicate the film wasn’t particularly well-executed. It subsequently did not perform very well at the box-office, and the film more-or-less dropped off my radar.

Fast-forward to this week. While browsing the DVD shelves of the public library I came across a copy of the movie. I thought what the heck, it worked for John Carter, and checked it out.

And I am glad I did, because that meant I didn’t have to pay for the movie.

Actually, that’s not wholly fair. The movie has some very good parts– quite a number, in fact. The problem seems to be that they are more than counter-balanced by things I consider net negatives. So much so, in fact, that I am dispensing with my normal review format and presenting my thoughts as pros and cons, which will allow me to praise the good bits and descant upon the bad.

But before we begin–

SPOILERS***SPOILERS***SPOILERS***SPOILERS***SPOILERS***

Pro: The premise is interesting– an alien race has invaded the Earth, overrunning most of Europe. The remaining nations of humanity band together to crush the aliens, inspired by an apparent initial victory. A major assault from England to France is planned. Unfortunately, the aliens have other plans.

Con: Tom Cruise’s character, Cage, an American officer who is basically just a PR front man. He is also an abject coward who literally tries to run away from battle. Perhaps this con is a little unfair, because it’s clear that we are meant to despise Cage, and so appreciate his redemption. Perhaps I would have bought it more readily if someone other than Cruise had played the role.

The assault goes badly, badly wrong. During the battle, Cage manages to kill a rare sort of alien. Bathed in the creature’s blood, he dies and finds himself returned to the previous day, fully aware of what has happened. He then loops through the same day, dying over and over again, as he slowly realizes he has to find a way to break the time-loop and beat the aliens.

Pro: Emily Blunt as Rita, a hardened soldier whose performance in the first human victory is held up as a major inspiration. She hides a secret, though– for a time she was also trapped in a time loop, like Cage. In the process she discovered that this is an ability the aliens possess, which they use to their advantage. Unless she and Cage can use that ability, now passed on to Cage, to figure out the hiding place of the Omega– the ruling hive mind of the invaders– and destroy it, the aliens will win. Blunt is one of the movie’s very brightest spots. She could have carried the film all by herself (hello, Hollywood, get a clue…).

Con: Tom Cruise. I mentioned this already, right?

Pro: You get to see Tom Cruise die over and over again.

Con: Unfortunately, you have to watch Emily Blunt die over and over again as well, which is a whole other basket of squirmy aliens.

Pro: Bill Paxton, as a loquacious master sergeant. Master Sergeant Farell is cheerfully poetic, in a blood-thirsty way. Paxton was obviously having a lot of fun with this role.

Con: Brits doing American accents. Why is it some, often very fine, British actors just can’t do ‘Murican? It puzzles the crap out of me, especially when they’re trying to do a Southern accent. Nails on a blackboard would be sweet by comparison.

Pro: I liked the powered exo-skeletons the soldiers are equipped with. They look very much like what I think a first-generation powered battle mechanism would look like.

Con: I hated the powered exo-skeletons the soldiers are equipped with, precisely because they resemble first-generation devices. It’s a story logic thingie– yeah, you can mounted an array of weapons on them, but they are slow and clunky (moving in them the soldiers look like they’ve just come down with a sudden misery in the bowels), and I would think that they would be more of a hindrance than an asset in an assault situation.

Con: Why in the name of heated Cheez Whiz are the Earthlings assaulting across what I presume are the beaches of France in the first place, as if it were 1944 all over again? Exactly where the enemy would have their strongest defenses (closest to the English advance bases)? Haven’t these people heard of “vertical envelopment” and “hitting them where they ain’t”?

I will now pause for a moment to dilate upon one of my pet peeves– the fact that too many people in Hollywood have no frigging clue how the military works. Everything from strategy down to nitpicking details like saluting and haircuts gets screwed up. For the love of Almighty God, even Vanessa Redgrave, who’s like the Mount Rushmore of British actors, absolutely flubbed her salute of Ralph Fiennes in Coriolanus. As for Edge of Tomorrow, was the director (Doug Liman) too scared of Tom Cruise to make him get a military haircut? Whatever the reason, Cruise’s shaggy thatch bugged me through the whole movie.

Okay, mini-rant over. Having said that–

Pro: the action in the assault, which we see over and over again as Cruise’s character relives it, is just as frantic and confused and horrible as a massive assault going wrong would be.

Con: the fact that we see nothing– I mean, nothing— from the aliens’ point-of-view. There is no communication between the besieged Earthlings and the invaders. We have no understanding of what the aliens are about or why they are doing what they are doing. Even Independence Day did a better job of that, with the telepathic interplay between the President and the alien prisoner (and, strange as it is, I enjoyed Independence Day more than I did Edge of Tomorrow, despite the former film’s horrifying and obvious cinematic flaws. Funny how that works…). The aliens in Edge of Tomorrow are just there as a monolithic threat. They are not characters in the story. For me, this is a net negative.

Pro: the production values of the movie are excellent, and, as far as it goes, Liman’s handling of the Groundhog Day/time loop plot device is pretty deft. Cage and Rita struggle with it and are forced to change directions a couple of times as they figure out the aliens and what has to be done.

Con: having said that, I kept expecting the revelation of an additional plot layer to the movie, perhaps a treasonous collaboration between Earthlings and aliens, perhaps something going on with the Earth forces commander, General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson). One or two plot points didn’t quite click, such as Brigham’s insistence on sending Cage, a useless PR man, into combat. It was almost as if Brigham had some darker purpose, some motive for getting rid of Cage, but no additional plot twist ever made sense of that action. I kept waiting for another shoe to drop, and it never did. Director’s cut…?

Con: the biggest one of all, the frustrating, story-negating ending. At the climax, when Rita has distracted the aliens at the cost of her own life, so that Cage can dive into the deep pool in the lower stories of the Louvre and blow up the Omega, if looks as if humanity has been saved by the sacrifice of both our heroes. But apparently, as Cage is drifting in the water, the last moments of his life flickering away, he is enveloped by the Omega’s blood/ichor/Super Sauce, and thereby time-looped back to a point in time before Brigham orders him into combat, but with the benefit that the aliens have still been wiped out by the death of Omega. Victory bells are ringing, humanity is saved, the suicidal assault doesn’t happen, and Rita can leave the military behind, go into acting and play Queen Victoria and the Baker’s Wife in Into the Woods, and all is right with the world.

Which really, really grates on me. The problem with this ending is that it is, effectively, a story in which nothing changes, or, to put it another way, in which there is no necessary sacrifice that brings about the resolution. At the very least I expected Cage or Rita to die heroically and stay dead, despite the time-loop, as the price to be paid for saving humanity. As it is, there is no net death or sacrifice, and the victory seems empty as a result. The only real change is that Cage is no longer a cowardly bean-bag, but for me that’s not enough to sustain an entire movie. To me the movie’s happy ending feels false and unearned. Almost by itself it kills the movie for me.

So, in sum, Edge of Tomorrow is a movie that does a lot of things right, but which left me dissatisfied. Now, it appears many critics disagree with me, so it is entirely possible that I am just too damn picky. Certainly, if a director’s cut ever comes out I would be willing to revisit the movie and take a fresh look at it.